Only 4 girls in group of 60 for PE

[katalex]

Dd told me that her year (y7) is split into 3 groups of 60 for PE. There is a group of 60 boys, a group of 60 girls and then there is her group which has 56 boys and 4 girls. She doesn't seem bothered by it but does think it's strange. Boys are expected to have football boots and shin pads but girls aren't so I assumed they would be separated for PE because they would do different sports. I get that if there are 4 'extra' girls then they have to put them somewhere but they have 3 PE teachers for every lesson so perhaps they could have had a slightly bigger girls group. What would you think about this?

Do the whole of Y7 do PE at the same time? If so that would be one teacher per group. IT may be that most of the time there will be people not doing PE for various reasons, so the 'extra' girls can join the main group if necessary.
Are the groups based on ability at all?
Also what does 'PE' mean? My DS has PE which generally means gym or fitness etc, whereas 'games' is football, hockey, cricket etc

That does seem odd! For the sake of 4 girls you would think they could just be added to the girl's group .... At DS's school PE is totally split between boys and girls and they do mostly the same sports but at different times (e.g. if the girls are in the sports hall, the boys will probably be doing an outside sport). I'd be querying it, unless it's just temporary?

Seems a bit odd - do you know if the 4 girls were randomly selected or if they might be ones who particularly wanted to do the same sports as is offered to the boys (though not sure why there would be a difference in yr 7, dds all girls school did some football and rugby... )

Dd thinks they might be grouped by ability because they did a fitness test in term 1 but she's not sure. I don't know if they've done any games yet. As far as I know, so far they've done stuff like fitness, yoga and cross country. I'm not sure what else.

The way dd explained it, it sounded like each group of 60 has 3 PE teachers. When I asked her who her PE teacher is, she didn't know any of their names, she just said there were always 3 of them. I think everyone does PE at the same time but I don't think the hall is big enough for 180 children.

I need to get some more information. I just wanted to get some opinions before asking the school how the groupings were decided.

Well it's weird, but there must be a reason they decided to do it like this. I'd ask personally.

If they'd been grouped by fitness then there would not be an all boys and an all girls set.

Good point Errol

I think you will have to ask the PE teachers. This is a novel one.

By any slim chance do the four girls have names that might be either a girls or a boys name, thinking Lee or Lesley for example and perhaps an admin error ignoring the sex and just going on name has caused this??? But then you'd think there might be errors the other way and the odd boy end up in the girl's group. Does seem a bit odd.

What is also strange is that her year group has 116 boys and only 64 girls! Is the birth gender split strange in your area or is there a local girls only school that affects the intake of your DDs school.
If it is just an anomaly of this year group then maybe they are used to having 2 single gender groups and one mixed and it is unfortunate that this year there is so few girls. I would however have expected the groups to either be all single sex or all mixed. Strange decision.